Consumers constantly decide which products and services best satisfy their needs and desires. Producers correspondingly decide how best to configure their products and services, from amongst a wide array of choices. They must not only choose a suitable price, but also must decide which combination of other attributes of their products and services will best satisfy consumers.
In order to facilitate these decisions, there have therefore arisen a variety of marketing research techniques. Among these are forced trade-off or forced choice methodologies, including conjoint analysis. Through statistical methods, these techniques allow prediction of which attributes of products and services are relatively more and less valuable to a given group of constituents.
Based on these conventional techniques, producers of goods and services are able to model buyers' or users' preferences, thereby facilitating design or selection of products and processes that best satisfy those preferences. For persons on two sides of a transaction (a producer and a group of consumers, for example), conventional techniques permit persons on one side of the transaction to model the preferences of a group of constituents on the other side of the transaction. Conventional techniques may therefore be called unilateral, or one-sided, evaluation techniques.